Oracle licensing changes impact on Amazon and Microsoft licenses

Get Oracle licensing update for Amazon EC2, RDS and Microsoft Azure.

As of January 23, 2017, Oracle Corporation changed its licensing policies for the so called “Authorized Cloud Environments”.

Initially, Oracle stated that for the “Authorized Cloud Environments” (including Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform) end users would need to consider each virtual core as a physical core (and multiply the amount of virtual cores by the Processor Core Factor) to determine the number of ‘Processors” that were required to be licensed.

Under the old policy, the methodology applied to all Oracle programs available on a Processor metric. Under the new policy, the methodology is only applicable to a subset of Oracle’s programs.

As of January 23, 2017, the new Oracle licensing policies, in which different counting methodologies are applied for Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS and Microsoft Azure, are as follows:

Amazon EC2 and RDS • End users are required to count two vCPUs (virtual Central Processing Unit) as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled

• End users are required to count one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled

Microsoft Azure • End users are required to count one Azure CPU Core as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license.

Full details of Oracle’s licensing policy on the “Authorized Cloud Environments” can be found here.

This change in licensing policy does support Oracle’s Cloud Strategy by making its own IaaS and PaaS Cloud Services more commercially attractive than the Cloud Services offered by its competitors.